Free from the watchful eyes of their parents and Ammachi, the children break up into two groups: the boys play cricket in the front yard, while the girls-plus Arjie-play out a fantasy wedding in a game they call “bride-bride.” Arjie always gets this game’s most prestigious role-that of the bride herself-until a new cousin, whom the others nickname “ Her Fatness,” arrives on the scene and tries to take over Arjie’s role. The first story, “Pigs Can’t Fly,” follows Arjie as a young child, when he cherishes his monthly playdate with all his cousins at his grandparents’ house. In addition to learning he is different from other boys and eventually recognizing that he is gay, Arjie must confront the increasingly tense and violent relations between Sri Lanka’s two major ethnic groups, the Tamils and Sinhalese, which break out into a civil war at the book’s end in 1983. Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy uses six loosely connected stories to recount the childhood and adolescence of a Sri Lankan Tamil boy, Arjie, who comes of age in Colombo during the 1970s and 1980s.
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